The Bone House Read online

  Amy read Hilary's status on Facebook, which had been posted from a cell phone only a few minutes earlier. Hilary had written: I'm having the same bad dream, and I'd really like to wake up.

  She didn't have any trouble understanding what Hilary meant. The previous year, she had followed the trail of events on Hilary's page as her husband faced accusations of having an affair with a student. Now it was deja vu.

  Amy clicked on one of the photos on Hilary's profile, which showed Mark Bradley painting on a Door County beach. Amy had barely known Mark in Chicago, but the girls who had had him as a substitute teacher had all fallen for him. He was the kind of teacher who inspired crushes. The strong, sensitive type. Handsome. Creative. He had it all. You wanted romance, but you also wanted someone who would make you feel safe in a dark alley. That was Mark Bradley.

  Amy thought about what her roommate had said. You can't judge people just by looking at them. She hated to think that her head was upside down about Glory's death. Gary Jensen might be nothing more than an innocent man whose wife had died in an accident, leaving him alone and bereft. Mark Bradley, solid, sexy, married to Amy's idol, might be the evil one. The killer. That was the obvious answer, and the obvious answer was usually the truth.

  You can't trust your instincts. Katie was probably right about that, too. Amy didn't have anything except her instincts to tell her what to think. She knew Hilary. Through her, she felt as if she knew Mark. She knew Gary, too.

  Instincts.

  Amy thought about sending Hilary a message on Facebook, to let her know that she was thinking about her and Mark. She wondered if she should mention her suspicions, but she didn't. Instead, she closed her computer and picked up her cell phone from the desk. She hesitated before dialing. Her breathing came faster. She felt the way she did before stepping out on to the floor of the arena for a performance.

  'Amy, what the hell are you doing?' she asked herself aloud.

  Rather than answer herself, she punched the buttons on the phone and waited. When he answered, she heard the slippery charm in his voice, and her skin crawled.

  It was Glory Fischer I saw you with. I know it was.

  'Gary? It's Amy Leigh.'

  Gary Jensen had no problem picturing Amy's face and body when she called. She was one of the girls he most enjoyed watching during her workouts in the gym. He liked it when her face glowed with the sweat of her routines and her legs and arms bulged with strength. She had full breasts, which were usually the enemy of a dancer, and even a tight bra couldn't stop them from swaying seductively. Her blonde hair would grow damp and paste itself to her skin. She was very attractive.

  He knew she didn't like him. She'd never made a secret of it. She listened to him and followed his instructions as a coach, but she was cold whenever he talked to her. Most of the girls played the game with him and flirted back at him when he made his advances, but Amy never did. He was surprised and curious to get her call.

  'Hello, Amy,' he said. 'What's up?'

  'I have some ideas for new moves,' she told him. 'Some really hot stuff. I figure we're going to have to take it up a notch to win next year, right?'

  'That's true,' he said, listening to the pitch of her voice. She spoke haltingly, which was unusual for Amy. She was typically among the most confident girls on his team.

  'I was thinking, maybe I could talk to you about it,' she went on. 'Maybe we could get together.'

  'Of course,' Gary said. 'I'd like that.'

  'Could we meet somewhere tomorrow?'

  'I wish I could, but tomorrow's not good for me. I have a meeting outside the city. What about Thursday night? I'm going to be reviewing videotapes of the dance performances from the competition. Why don't you come by my house, and we'll look at them together? I'd like your input.'

  He heard hesitation on the other end of the line. Then she said, 'Yeah, all right. I'll do that.'

  'You know where I live, don't you? It's near the end of Bay Settlement across from the county park.'

  'I know it.' He expected her to hang up, but she added after a long pause, 'Hey, Gary, I know I should have asked this before, but how are you?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Well, it hasn't been very long since you - you know, since you lost your wife, and I know how hard that was. I felt really bad for you. I just wanted to make sure you're OK.'

  'That's kind of you to say, Amy. I wouldn't say I'm OK, but I'm dealing with it.'

  'Good.'

  'I'll see you on Thursday.'

  He hung up the phone. He stroked his chin with two fingers, thinking about the girl's nervous manner and wondering about her real agenda. Part of him was suspicious at the timing, coming so soon after Florida. She'd mentioned his wife, too. He didn't like that.

  He was in the master bedroom of his turn-of-the-century house, which he had bought five years ago when he moved to Green Bay. The wallpaper was a heavy pattern of burgundy and gold. The bedroom set, which came with the house, was made of walnut, with imposing four-poster columns on the queen bed and a matching ornate bureau that stood beside the window like a grim soldier. Michelle had nagged him to sell the furniture, so they could redecorate the room and make it lighter and happier. They'd never had the chance.

  Gary peered out through the floor-to-ceiling curtains at the empty road beyond the yard.

  He still had flashbacks of Michelle falling. He could see the terror in her eyes as she screamed. He'd cried, seeing it happen, watching her die. At that moment, he'd thought about throwing himself after her. There were still days when the pain and loss were almost impossible to bear.

  If only there had been another way. If only she hadn't learned the truth.

  Gary dialed his phone and watched the road, which grew darker as dusk fell. When he heard the familiar voice, he said, 'It's me. We may have a problem.'

  * * *

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mark Bradley wore a white mask as he repaired the damage done to their house by the vandals. He wished the cowards had come while he was home and given him a chance to fight. On Tuesday, while Hilary was back at school, he'd swept up the glass and debris, hauled the broken furniture out to the street, and scraped down the walls. By late Wednesday, he had torn out the carpet and covered the living room in two coats of fresh paint. At least he no longer had the word staring him in the face.

  KILLER.

  While the paint dried, he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and took it out to the screened three-season porch at the rear of the house. He sat down in the wrought-iron chaise, which squealed under his weight. Before he drank, he realized he was still wearing the white painter's mask. He peeled it from his face. He tilted the bottle and took a long swallow. His neck was tired and sore, and he rubbed it with his fingers.

  That was when he felt the small bump of two scabs on his skin. Scratches.

  Mark closed his eyes and felt a cold sweat of fear form on his body. 'Son of a bitch,' he murmured.

  He remembered Glory on the beach and felt the girl hanging on to him as she wrapped her hands around his neck. Her long nails drove into his skin, hurting him. Leaving a mark.

  He knew what that meant.

  The police in Florida had gathered skin cells from inside his mouth with a cotton swab and bagged the sample and labeled it. They would hunt under Glory's dead fingernails and find skin there, and analyze the tissue, and match it. One name would come out: Mark Bradley.

  They'd know he had been there. On the beach. With Glory.

  Mark put the bottle down. His taste for beer was gone. He stared through the dormant trees at the gray water of the harbor a hundred yards away. In two months, when the leaves unfurled, the beach would be invisible behind the birches. He couldn't help but wonder if he would be here to see it, or if they would have arrested him by then.

  They can prove you were there. They can't prove you killed her.

  He wasn't convinced the distinction would sway a jury if it came to that. When a teenage girl died, everyone
wanted to see someone pay the price.

  Mark felt a wave of anger. It was happening to him more and more now. Moments of rage. He was naturally claustrophobic, and when the walls began to close in, he beat on them and tried to fight his way out. If he couldn't find an escape, he wanted to punish the ones who had put him there.

  His phone rang on the table beside him. It was Hilary, and he relaxed when he heard her voice. Sometimes she had a sixth sense for when he needed her.

  'I'm in Northport waiting for the ferry,' she told him. 'I'll be home in an hour or so.'

  'Good.'

  'How's it going?' she asked.

  'Better. The house is looking better.'

  She listened to his voice. He could feel her divining his mood. 'You OK?'

  'Not really.'

  'What's up?'

  'Not on the phone,' he said. He was already paranoid, wondering if the police were listening in on their calls.

  'Let's go out for dinner tonight,' she suggested.

  'Are you sure? You know what it'll be like.'

  He was reluctant to go out anymore in the midst of other people from the island. He was sick of the dark stares and muttered hostility from people around them.

  'Screw everybody else,' Hilary told him. 'We can't let them stop us from living our lives.'

  He smiled. 'Damn right.'

  'See you soon.'

  She hung up. He picked up his beer again and continued drinking. He reminded himself, as he did on most days, how lucky he had been to find Hilary Semper. Some men weren't secure enough to marry a woman who was smarter than they were, but he'd had plenty of experience with women who only wanted him to show him off to their friends. He'd even married one when he was twenty-five, a bubbly brunette who had stalked him on the pro tour and seduced him into bed and then into the courthouse. He was young; she was young. She talked a good game about loving all the same things he did, when all she really wanted was a ring and a husband who made her girlfriends jealous.

  It had lasted two long years. When he divorced her, he'd sworn to himself: never again.

  Not long after the split, he'd had ten beers too many and driven his car into a median on the Kennedy Expressway. Stupid. He could have died. Instead, surgery gave him back his life, but not his career. After rehab, he had ninety per cent range of motion in his left shoulder, but a pro golfer needed about a hundred and ten per cent. A hundred and twenty if you're Tiger. He wasn't going to play professionally again. Golf was dead to him.

  What seemed like a curse at the time turned out to be a blessing. He was insanely competitive when he stepped on to a playing field, but he learned that he was something more than a golfer, a competitor, and an athlete. He went back to something he hadn't done since he was a teenager. Painting. He took up reading again and devoured the classics. He found himself attracted to teaching because it was so unlike his prior life and because it gave him time to become someone he liked a lot better than Mark Bradley, pro golfer.

  It made him poor, too. That was the downside.

  As the money dried up, he assumed the come-ons would vanish, but he discovered that looks were enough for plenty of women of all ages. He could have slept his way to a comfortable lifestyle, but he'd already been through one loveless marriage. He said yes to the occasional fling, but nothing that ever felt serious for either of them. Not until Hilary. Hilary, who was sexy and didn't even have a clue about it. Hilary, who blew him away because everything she said was so damn interesting, and because she didn't seem to care about what anyone else thought about her.

  Hilary. It took his breath away sometimes to think that she married him.

  That was why the anger kept coming back. It was the fear that he might lose everything he had. He had already lost his job, and now he worried that he would lose his house, his freedom, and the one woman he'd ever really wanted.

  All because he took a walk on the beach. All because of Glory Fischer.

  Mark went back into the house, where the sickly sweet air freshener covered the stench of the filth that had been thrown against the walls. He decided to take a run to offload his frustrations. For the first time, he took a key with him and locked the front door as he left the house. This was Washington Island. No one locked their doors. There was no one to fear, because the rest of the world was half an hour away across Death's Door.

  Not anymore.

  He stretched among the dead leaves in their dirt driveway, loosening his muscles. The forest around him was still. As he bent and touched his fingers to his toes, he noticed his Ford Explorer sagging at a queer angle in the clearing among the trees. When he looked closely, he saw that two of the tires were flat. The rubber had been slashed, and the rusty ax that had done the damage lay next to the truck in the weeds.

  They were sending him a message. He could cover it up with paint, but no one was going to let him forget. Killer.

  Mark picked up the ax, which was heavy and old. He weighed it in his hand. He felt his anger rush back, and he threw the ax at the flaky white trunk of a young birch tree, where it impaled itself, its handle quivering. He dug the ax out and swung it again, making a deep wound in the side of the tree. He did it again and again, wood and bark flying, until he ran out of breath and the immature tree stood on nothing more than a ragged fraction of its trunk. He wrapped his hands around the tree as if it were someone's throat and pushed until the tree groaned and cracked away from its base and toppled into the forest with a crash.

  He staggered backward into his driveway. His chest heaved. His face was flushed. The ax dropped from his hand.

  He heard a noise from the road and swung round fiercely, expecting to see them coming for him. The vandals. The punks. He was ready to take them on, hand to hand.

  It wasn't anyone from the island.

  A purple Corvette was parked at the base of his driveway, looking oddly out of place in the island wilderness. He saw a ridiculously tall man in a business suit standing next to the Corvette's door, leaning on it and watching him from behind sunglasses that made no sense on a dark day. He'd been watching as Mark exploded with rage.

  It was Cab Bolton.

  Cab climbed back into the rented Corvette under Bradley's hostile glare. He had no interest in having a conversation with Mark Bradley right now, but he wanted the man to know he had followed him home. The investigation wasn't over, and if Bradley thought he had escaped with his freedom that easily, he was wrong. Cab also knew, watching Bradley erupt in fury with the ax, that his original opinion of the man had been correct.

  Mark Bradley had a temper. Push him hard enough, and he lost control.

  Cab did a U-turn and returned to the road that led past Schoolhouse Beach and out to the island's main highway beyond the cemetery. It occurred to him that he'd been in most corners of the world, and he didn't think he had ever felt quite as remote as he did now, on this island at the tip of the Door County peninsula. The entire stretch of land north of Sturgeon Bay felt as if he were driving through a winter ghost town, with shuttered storefronts and long stretches of forest and dormant farmlands. It was beautiful and ominous, like a transplanted corner of New England where someone had posted No Trespassing signs to keep out the rest of the world.

  He'd never spent much time in the Midwest. In his head, he'd always thought of it as a place where winter lasted nine months, the cows outnumbered the people, and the land was flat and endless. Nothing he'd seen so far had changed his mind.

  On the way back to the ferry port, he found a Western-style saloon in need of paint, immediately adjacent to the road. The sign said Bitters Pub. When he parked in the gravel in front of the bar, his Corvette stood out like a Hot Wheels play car next to the row of dusty pickups and hulking SUVs. He got out and smelled a waft of pine blowing in with the cold lake air. Inside, the odor of stale cigarette smoke choked the bar. He stripped off his sunglasses. He saw a long oak counter with stools on his left, square card tables scattered across a hardwood floor, and two pool tables at the rear. The w
alls were crowded with knick-knacks like logging saws and skis.

  Three men with huge bellies drank beer, played pool, and blew smoke rings. A bored bartender, young and cute, eyed him in his expensive suit with a curious smile. A grizzled fireplug of a man sat at the bar with a mug of coffee in front of him. Cab approached the bar, and the bartender sauntered his way. She had her black hair loose, and she wore a rust wool sweater and frayed jeans.

  'Help you?'

  'I'm looking for Sheriff Felix Reich,' Cab told her. 'One of his deputies told me I could probably find him here.'

  The girl nodded her head at the fireplug seated at the end of the bar. 'Sheriff,' she called, 'somebody's looking for you.'

  Sheriff Reich's head swiveled slowly, and he took the measure of Cab from head to toe with the pinched expression of a man biting into a lemon. His eyes started at Cab's spiky blond hair and moved down his long body, taking in his pinstripes, tie, and polished loafers, and then traveled back up again, focusing on Cab's manicured fingernails and gold earring. When he was done, Reich turned away to study the steam rising out of his coffee cup, as if that was more interesting than anything Cab was likely to say.

  'What can I do for you?' Reich said. His voice was as gravelly as the back roads on the island.

  Cab took a seat two stools from the sheriff, with his back to the bar and his stilt-like legs stretched out into the middle of the hardwood floor. He balanced his elbows on the bar behind him. The white cuffs of his shirt, which were closed with onyx cufflinks, jutted out from the sleeves of his suit coat. He was accustomed to looking like an outsider and immune to the stares and silence when he went somewhere he didn't belong. This place was no different from a hundred others.